


The Switch

by metaphlame



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: AU, FemJohn, Femlock, Gen, Genderswap, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-06
Updated: 2014-10-03
Packaged: 2018-02-11 23:44:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2087541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/metaphlame/pseuds/metaphlame
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some handle the sudden global switching of gendered bodies better than others.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I don't actually like the implication in the title that there is merely A and B with nothing in between or outside. I intend to contest that binary as the story moves along.

Like most great events, people tried to explain The Switch away after the fact. Tried to say they'd seen it coming, that it was inevitable, really--had people only paid attention to this weather pattern or that religious doomsayer, they too would have avoided being blindsided by that which, in truth, blindsided everyone. 

The fact was, there was no explanation for The Switch. No comical forays into ancient temples and sudden, violent shakings of the earth. No parting of the seas, no explosions, no ultimatums handed down from on high--wherever "on high" meant for you. No deaths. At least, not initially. 

There were those who could not handle The Switch, of course. Those who, after trying to make sense of the change in their anatomy for a few days or weeks or months, found it too foreign, too confounding, and who checked out, either mentally through drugs or alcohol, or literally through the usual array of means mankind manufactures to end itself. 

But such strident reactions to The Switch were, to the surprise of no few who lived through those times, rare. Far more common was a distant uneasiness, an awkwardness instantly recognizable for what it was--the stumbling of a baby deer on legs too new for it. For these bodies were new. Old in years, maybe, or young; pitted and scarred or voluptuous and unmarred, but still new. Unknown. Longed-for, in some cases, welcomed in others, and ultimately accustomed to in many. But heartbreakingly new, always and forever.

Relationships sundered. Gender studies leapt for a time to a positions of utmost prominence on academic rosters. What made you who you were? You who once saw the world from inside a man's body, lusting after women, now walking about with breasts of your own, your wife now a hairy being beside you in your bed. Do you still love her? How much of your love attached itself to her body, and how long must your unmoor yourself from her physicality to love her back? Can both of you manage to hang onto what you felt, and touch parts of each other that didn't exist before, with hands that don't feel like your own?

Oftentimes, the answer was no. Wives, husbands, girlfriends, boyfriends--many parted ways, some with more acrimony than others. Some sought the same shapes they'd always desired, fumbling into expressions of a sexuality they'd scorned once. Others, religious and not, persisted in their discomfort with any pairing other than male and female, and threw themselves without love into relations they viewed as right, if empty. Still others rejoiced. Those who had been born into the wrong bodies to begin with now woke up that day with the one they'd longed for, oftentimes for most of their lives. The Switch was not without its ardent fans. It was now the formerly cisgendered who had to pour money into surgeons' coffers to try and shape themselves into a semblance of what they should have been. Of what they were, once.

Like assassinations and peace treaties, where you were on the day of The Switch became an instant conversation-starter. At your parents' house. On a red-eye flight. Asleep at your desk on the night shift. Night, always night, the world over--and always during sleep. A kindness, this, some thought, not having to see your body change so swiftly, so much. As news reports started sweeping the world from the international dateline onward, some people tried to cheat what they saw as an oncoming tide. They chugged energy drinks, set alarms to blare at the droop of an eyelid; begged their friends to wake them. Eventually they all slept, though, and they all switched. The curious set up phones and computers to record themselves as they slept, to try and record the change the news warned them was coming. A few actually caught the changes on tape and they were unnerving--pants growing slack and shirts growing tight; stubble appearing where only down had been before. Eventually these videos would become legendary in certain circles, a kind of "change porn," equally revered and reviled for the inexplicable sea change they documented. People replayed them again and again, trying to place themselves in the shot, trying to imagine how their own changes would have looked from the outside.

John had watched them, as had everyone else, as a way to try to understand what had come to pass. And like most people who watched the videos, he found little solace in them. What did the retreat of a young women's breasts in New Zealand have to do with the sudden appearance of his own? What the thinning hair up top, and the eruption of hair in the armpits, of the woman who'd been the Cadbury poster child have to do with the sudden and cataclysmic disappearance of his penis?

It did not help to share a flat, throughout the chaos thrown up by The Switch, with one Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes, who had once been a tall, ethereal, disapproving, oddly piercing man, and who was now a tall, ethereal, disapproving, oddly piercing woman. At least, that was what his voice and the box of tampons under the sink said. The man was still inside that willowy woman's body. Sherlock had undergone the Switch like everyone else. The vexing thing was that he didn't seem to mind much.

Even the very morning of the Switch, he'd seemed fascinated rather than distraught. John still remembered his own slow rise to consciousness, the insistent sense of something being _off_, the bedsheets in disarray around him and more tactile, somehow, in areas they oughtn't to have been. The muddle of morning fuzz thoughts--why do I feel like this? am I hungover? did I have a roll in the sheets with--oh _god,_ the sheets! Me under them! And then the scrabbling, the touching, the middle-aged woman's breasts sitting on his ribcage like two perfect strangers. The howling absence between his legs.

And the shriek that rose in his throat when he realized he was being watched this entire horrifying time by a tall slender woman in a dressing gown, leaning against the doorjamb with her hands tucked up into the slightly too-long sleeves. "Oh John," she quipped dryly as he clutched the blankets round himself in a vain attempt at protection from--who? What? Himself? "Trust you to sleep in on the most important day in human history."

"What in the--" John began, but clamped his mouth shut on the voice that wasn't his own. They were his words, but not his voice. 

"I've been watching you for hours," the woman said from the doorway, stepping forward into the beams of light that had shouldered their way through the blinds. One of the beams lit up those too-pale eyes and John knew, then. "I was hoping to see it happen but I missed it. Stepped into the bathroom for only a moment, for the mirror, and like a fool I didn't set up a camera beforehand. It seems that it only happens to people when they sleep, and only a few people have caught it on video so far. They've uploaded to YouTube but I rather wanted first-hand evidence myself." The woman paused in her padding across the floor, narrowing her eyes on a distant point. "This will be terribly interesting. Football, finance, even the weatherman--you should have seen her, though I suppose I mean him now, try to talk about the storms in the west, all while desperately trying to keep her empty bra from falling off her--what, what is it?"

John's voice was a croak, a plea, coming from a vocal register not his own and out of lips not his own and toward a flatmate not his own but so, so familiar. 

"Sherlock?"

And then, to his horror, John Watson had started to cry. Right there in his own bed, but not his own body, not one he'd be willing to call his own then or ever. When his attempt to choke down on the strange-sounding sobs started turning them into gulping, gasping wheezes instead, he felt a cool hand pat his shoulder stiffly, awkwardly.

"Breathe, John," said the woman who was Sherlock, in a voice low with command intended to soothe. "Just breathe." 

And John breathed. One, two, three.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A lighter chapter. More to make sure I could manage it if required than because I particularly wanted to do it.

John still bristled at that memory, even now. He was not a crying man, or at least didn't like to think of himself as one. And as more days passed, and news anchors began to don clothing more becoming to their new bodies as they reported on everything from therapy booms to orgies to proselytizers to riots, John felt it important to keep a handle on himself. With everyone else rampaging over this unlooked-for, unexplained disruption of what had been normal life, it was vital that John Watson remain cool, calm, in control. 

Which was why he now found himself standing in line outside the women's changing room in Debenham’s, buried under a pile of jackets, jeans and jumpers that Sherlock had just handed him. Cool, calm, in control.

"Is this really necessary, Sherlock?" John grimaced, not for the first time that morning. "Maybe we'll change back. Then what a waste is money this will have been!"

Sherlock emerged from the warren of clothes racks again, sporting the smirk that was still startlingly familiar on those fuller lips. "John. Do you really think that's likely at this point? It's been a month. It's time to get clothes that fit you. Ah, here we go, we're next." Sherlock prodded John with the coat hanger of a--oh god, was that a brassiere?

"My clothes do fit," John sulked, reaching to close the changing room for only to be bumped into by Sherlock as he--she? no, Sherlock was still Sherlock--sailed in behind him. "Really? You really need to accompany me to try on clothes?"

"Your clothes do _not_ fit, John, which is why, yes, I do need to accompany you. Without me you wouldn't even be here--you'd be cavorting through the streets in your misshapen shirts with the gap."

"The gap?"

Sherlock snorted. "Yes, John, there's a gap! Look." He reached out suddenly, cupping one of John's breasts in each hand, pushing them closer to each other through the shirt. John jumped at the contact. "See? This is how it's supposed to look. And this is how it looks now." Sherlock let go, and the shirt parted at John's chest, the swell of his breasts pulling the shirt into an inch-wide gap between two buttons.

John felt his face heat, and avoided looking to his left and the mirror that dominated the wall there. "No one has said anything before," he muttered.

"Of course they haven't! Everyone's shitting themselves about this whole thing. But you, John, can rise above that. That's part of your plan, isn't it? To remain the level-headed doctor amidst chaos and confusion?"

John knew his face was even redder now.

"Oh, don't give me that look, you knew I knew it somewhere in that empty head of yours. Go on then, John: be level-headed. Face it." Sherlock reached out again with his long fingers, grabbing John by the shoulders and spinning him toward the mirror. "Look, John."

John looked. He saw the tall, curly-headed flatmate who happened to be a little softer around the mouth now, but whose eyes and tongue were as sharp as they'd always been. Hands as pale and long. And he saw the figure on which those hands rested--the shorter, heavy-breasted woman with close-cropped hair and full hips, a troubled cast to her eyes. Her eyes.

"This is you, John." The woman in the trench coat spoke to the mirror. "You need to deal with this. If you want to be the dependable John Watson you pride yourself on being, you need to deal with this."

The shorter woman's reflection grimaced. "I'm still me, Sherlock. Why didn't they change that? I'm still me, beneath. I just don't match up with the outside anymore." 

He tried to look away, then, but Sherlock caught his jaw with long nails and turned his face back to the mirror. "What doesn't match? Show me what doesn't match." His voice was low, almost as low as it was when he was in a man's body, and commanding.

John's heart hammered hard in his chest, ridiculously. He tried looking at Sherlock but the fingers held him fast. He met the pale-eyed gaze in the mirror instead. "I...I don't know. I don't know, Sherlock."

The fingers withdrew as suddenly as they'd arrived. "Precisely. No one does. Everyone is in the same boat here. So stop insisting on wearing shirts that make you look like a sack of potatoes. And try one of these." He held up the dreaded brassiere John had glimpsed earlier, cream with a bit of lace around the edges.

"Oh god, Sherlock, no."

That smirk again. "Why not? You clearly need it. You're rather busty, you know."

John tried to ignore the blush he knew had returned, seemingly his constant companion today. "I don't see you wearing one."

"How observant of you! But that is because I don't need one, you see. You, on the other hand..." John half-thought Sherlock would grab him again, but he merely gestured in the direction of John's chest. "You'd be a lot more comfortable, I believe."

John glared for a long moment at the bra dangling from his flatmate's fingers. "It isn't fair, you know," he sighed, reaching out for the bra at last. "That you're supposed to wear these things."

"I believe that point may have been made once or twice before, yes," Sherlock replied blithely.

Blushing furiously, John located the cups in what looked like the proper position, but then had to twist and flail to reach the hooks in the back. "I...can't..." He hissed. "Idiot things."

"I would have expected you to have rather more experience with these, honestly. Here, let me."

"Taking them off, sure! Who puts them back on?"

"Clearly not Dr. John Watson."

Bra fastened, Sherlock stepped back and smiled. "There, see? Fits like a dream. I had your numbers exactly."

"Why am I not surprised?" John tried shrugging his shoulders. Felt the pinch of the straps, watched his breasts bob up and down--but much less so than when they just dangled about, as they had been for weeks. "It's uncomfortable," he said, mostly due to the straps.

"They all are," Sherlock replied, surveying his handiwork in the mirror. "But don't tell me you haven't heard of women getting breast reduction surgery to alleviate back pain from too-large breasts. You need the support, John."

"Don't talk to me about breast reduction surgery. If I had devoted myself to cosmetic changes instead of saving lives I'd have been a millionaire in this past month alone. We can't book people fast enough."

"They're wasting their time. Here, try this on now."

John took proffered button-down, eyeing it doubtfully before pulling it over his head. "How are they wasting their time?" His voice came out muffled from between folds of cloth. 

"Because in most cases, it isn't what they have that bothers them. It's what they don't have, and science hasn't found a way to bring that back yet."

When John's popped out of the blue shirt--it did look all right, he supposed, though powder blue wouldn't have been his first choice--he kept his face, with the aid of the mirror, schooled to thoughtfulness; his voice light. "And what about you, then, Sherlock?"

"What about me?"

"You don't seem to...do you miss...."

Sherlock watched him expectantly. John tried again.

"Do you still want to be called he? Him?"

"Do you?"

"Well, yes--"

"Then I will continue to use the male pronoun when discussing you."

"Yes, but what about you?"

The woman sharing the room with him stretched luxuriously, like a cat, and regarded John's reflection with those pale eyes. Again like a cat. "John, this is getting boring. You may call me whatever you want. Hurry up and try on the rest of this so we can go do something more interesting."

"Why bother? You already know it will fit me anyway." 

"You don't know if you'll like it, though."

"And I don't know if you like being a called a woman, dammit! Can't you just answer the question?"

Sherlock turned away from the mirror, then, to face John directly. "That wasn't your question before. You asked what I wished to be called and I told you. Do I like being a woman?" That voice tunneled to its lowest possible depths, rooting John to the ground where he stood. "I have no idea. Because I'm not a woman, John. This--" he flicked his hands up and down, encompassing torso to legs-- "this is packaging. You said it first--I am still me. Whatever force wrought this change in all of us, it left us that." 

"But you said--"

"I asked you to show me what doesn't match. So do it. Show me where I end and my body begins."

John opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. Saw the same willowy flatmate he'd always known, a little smug smile on his face, daring him. Daring him to find a disconnect between what was and what is; between the Sherlock who solved the Study in Pink and the Sherlock who stood in front of him now in the same dark trench coat, under the same tumbling curls, smirking with a woman's mouth but also, inescapably, Sherlock's mouth.

"You really don't give a damn, do you," John sighed. "The whole world turns upside down and it's just same-old same-old to you."

"Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. But nevermind that, you have a mountain of clothing to go through."

John tugged off the blue shirt--which lacked the gap, he noticed, and flared out the slightest bit over hips he didn't used to have--and reached for another. He was up to his eyeballs in cloth when he decided _oh fuck it, just ask._

"What I was actually asking was whether you missed your penis," John mumbled.

"Come again?"

"You heard me."

"Alas, John, I have many powers, but the aural sensitivity of a bat is not one of them. Come out of that shirt and say it again."

John would have preferred to remain swathed in fabric when he asked this particular question, but he sighed and burrowed toward the light anyway. So much else had changed, why get sheepish about this one question? "I wanted to know if, I mean, you know, you...missed..."

His head popped out to meet Sherlock's frank, penetrating gaze, and John felt for a moment like a deer in the headlights.

"Yes?" 

"If you missed it. Your, um. Nether regions."

"I believe we've had this conversation before."

John stared. "We did?"

"Yes. You asked if I had a girlfriend, I said that wasn't really my area, end of story. Do try to keep up."

"That wasn't what I was asking."

"Essentially yes, it was. Now are you going to go through the rest of these items or am I going to have to pull them onto you one by one?"

"Sherlock--"

_"John."_

John bit off what he was going to say.

"You are asking me whether I share your feelings about being utterly lost in your new body, the one you haven't had sex with for weeks-- which is a lifetime for you, I know--the body, moreover, you're afraid of, more so than anything else you remember. Well, the answer is no. I do not share your fears, John. Are you happy now? Shall we continue?"

"How?"

John had to meant to ask it, hadn't meant to say anything after Sherlock's...clarification, but he'd caught sight of himself in the mirror again, so not the person he was had to seeing (still), and he had to ask. If Sherlock was so comfortable in his new body, he had to ask. 

In response, Sherlock flashed a deliberately feral grin and threw his arm around John's shoulders, meeting his gaze in the mirror. "By me calling you John, and you calling me Sherlock, and both of us chasing murderers around the city, like always. Is that really so hard?”

It might be easier, John thought, if he still fit all the same clothes, or if he could slay people with a flash of his teeth, no matter how thorny his disposition. In that respect, at least, little had changed.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A case at last. Also, Lestrade.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Discussion touches on miscarriage.

After the initial shock that accompanied the period following the Switch, the numbers of thefts, assaults and murders picked back up to their usual levels. Whatever philosophizing sycophants wished to posit about a reversal of X and Y chromosomes and the social implications of a biological shift in what was formerly the more violence-prone segment of the population, there were still crimes to solve. 

There would always be crimes to solve.

Computers, it turned out, were rather unimpressed with the reversal of the sexes. Facial recognition software, even at the rudimentary stage it was then in, found little difficulty pinning a burglary on the woman caught on camera robbing a chip shop who had robbed the same shop six months ago as a man. Facebook went more or less unperturbed by the upheaval of its populace. Apple's iPhoto still clustered the little boy of today with the little girl he had been not long ago.

Thus the first few weeks of the Switch were fairly underwhelming for Sherlock. Vastly overestimating the amount of cover their change would give them, criminals the world over threw caution to the winds, taking absurd risks so obvious even the incompetents over at Scotland Yard--as Sherlock was so fond of reminding anyone and everyone--couldn't miss them. At least not with the aid of the basic technologies so widespread by that point.

It was terribly boring, really.

Five blistering concertos into the dry spell of cases, John was more than a little grateful when Lestrade's face--the one John knew--appeared on Sherlock's phone.

"Answer it," Sherlock ordered from the kitchen, where his eyes were narrowed on a slender glass beaker bubbling over a flame. "I'm busy."

John sighed and got up from his armchair to retrieve the phone from sofa cushions where it lay chiming and flashing Lestrade's face caught at a most unflattering angle--probably taken, from the looks of it, when he'd just been resounding and deservingly mocked by a certain consulting detective.

"Sherlock's phone!" John cried almost cheerfully. "Lestrade, it's been ages."

"Yes, well," sighed a woman's voice, tired and strained. "Things've happened. You might've noticed." 

Humor, it seemed to John, was one way people were dealing with this, and he thought he should try. "I may have noticed," he chuckled, sounding a bit too forced. He thought he caught Sherlock rolling his eyes, but he didn't glance over fast enough to be sure.

"Right. Well, when you can drag Sherlock away from whatever crazy experiment he's working on, could you get him to head over to the Garden Bridge site? He, ah…he still uses 'he,' right?"

"Oh." John scrubbed a hand through his hair; he'd have to get it cut soon. "He does, yeah. You?"

"I do. But Anderson's a she, if you see him. Her. Can't stand the dissonance, she says."

"Okay." John didn't know what else to say. "We'll--" He turned, and Sherlock was standing in the doorway, fully dressed, arms crossed. Impatient. "We'll be right there."

Their cabbie was a woman in a bright blue sari. Watching her, John wondered if what he saw as the more strictly-defined gender roles of other cultures helped the cabbie's transition, or hurt it. He or she certainly didn't seem perturbed in the least as she ferreted them out into the stream of traffic, listening to a Hindi radio station. Next to him, the dull white glow of a smartphone screen lit up Sherlock's face from below; he was typing furiously and would be pointless to interrupt with questions he'd just ignore. 

"Neither harder nor easier, John," Sherlock said suddenly, eyes never leaving the screen in his hands.

John blinked. "Come again?"

"It makes it neither harder nor easier." His eyes flicked toward the front for only a moment. "Don't be so stupid, it doesn't become you."

"I'll, um, try to avoid that in the future," John replied, glancing involuntarily toward the rear-view mirror to see if the cabbie had registered any of this. She still bobbed her head faintly to the music, murmuring along with the chorus of the song. 

"At least until she gets pregnant," Sherlock added.

John blinked again, but remained silent this time. He hadn't even considered pregnancy. Not for himself, anyway. He didn't think any of the newly-minted females he'd treated so far in the surgery had, either. Christ, did the list of things he had to take into account now never end? 

They reached the Garden Bridge site--a cleared-out area on the south bank intended once to be the starting point of a great plant-laden span for pedestrians only, arcing out over the river to provide a little greenery and a lot of traffic alleviation. John had seen the mock-ups in the papers; it had been intended to be dominated by trees and shrubs, but the supports had carried a distinctly fluted shape, like the upside-down claws of an antique bathtub. For this reason the bridge had met no little amount of resistance in its planning stages; now that the time and space had finally been set aside for its construction the money had dried up, leaving only this cavernous construction site and a few hundred rightfully furious people turned out of their homes and businesses for no good reason.

Lestrade, coming over to their cab as they stepped out, had clearly gone a long way further even then Sherlock had dragged John in kitting himself out in his new identity. Heeled leather boots clung halfway up his well-formed legs which--John squinted at them in the late afternoon sunlight--most definitely appeared shaved. His skirt, silk scarf and jacket all hung comfortably on him, even if he did move a bit cautiously in the heels. A black armband snugged the coat tight around his left arm and John gaped.

"I…I'm sorry for your loss," he stammered.

Lestrade, in tasteful makeup and whose square jaw set off his face well beneath his still-very-short hair, looked away. "Thanks."

"I wasn't even aware you were trying," said Sherlock, cocking his head and narrowing his eyes in that way that reeked of analysis. "You weren't, were you?"

"Shut up, Sherlock," John snapped. 

"You weren't," Sherlock repeated.

"No. I wasn't. She wasn't going to tell me until--you know. Until it's safe."

"Thirteen weeks." Sherlock's voice was clipped, professional. 

"Right. And then this happened." Lestrade's arms rose out to either side, encompassing the whole of him--boots, legs, A-line coat. Black armband marking him as a parent of one of the Lost. The children in the wombs of pregnant women who, upon changing into men, had winked out of existence, leaving tragedy in their wake. "She, ah. She wants to try again."

It took John a moment to process what this meant. 

"You might consider a fertility clinic," Sherlock murmured distractedly, eyes already roving over the construction site, bored with Lestrade. "Your clock is ticking. Isn't that what they say?"

"Jesus, Sherlock, show some compassion!" John snarled, but Lestrade didn't seem to be listening.

"All this. The clothes, the…" He gestured with varnished nails toward his face. "All hers. We're the same size, I guess." He sighed. John knew those eyes, only in a different face--rounder, more naked, a little grizzled maybe. This Lestrade carried several burdens at once. "She thought it would make it easier. Look better."

John frowned. "Look better?"

Lestrade rubbed his face in a gesture John recognized from before the Switch, smearing his lipstick across one cheek. "You know. Man and woman, that sort of thing."

"But you're not," John insisted.

"Aren't I? I have a clock now. Which ticks, so I hear." Lestrade's flat stare was wasted on Sherlock, who wasn't even pretending to pay attention anymore, drifting farther and farther down the slope of the embankment.

"But that's hardly--but you're still you, Greg. Like all of us. You still go by he, don't you?"

"Yes, but she wants me to switch. I'm…on the fence about it."

John fought twin urges to excoriate and to temper his sudden outrage--where did this come from?--with sympathy. This man had just lost a child, after all. "But…how does any of that signify anymore? For any of us? Man and woman…what does that even mean?"

Lestrade caught sight of his hand, stained by smeared lipstick, and winced, touching his face. "For me? It's a chance to give my wife part of herself back." He shook his head. "Husband, I mean. She wants me to call her my husband."

Into the silence John didn't have the first idea how to fill came Sherlock's petulant sigh. "Surely you have a mystery for us to solve here, detective? Or did you call us all the way out here to discuss your love life?"

“Down there, in the barrels,” Lestrade called, then lowered his voice for only John to hear. “He really doesn’t mind, does he? Same old Sherlock, poking around murder scenes. Business as usual to him.”

“This is actually the first case we’ve had in quite a long time,” John replied, evasive. A tightness between his shoulder blades, a flutter in his gut.

“That wasn’t what I meant.”

They watched Sherlock slide down the dirt bank and shame the milling investigators away from the bright orange barrels, his voice dripping with disdain even from this distance. Soon he was removing implements from his pockets and bending close over the barrels, where John guessed something grisly had gone on.

“I don’t think he minds,” he said after a moment. Still watching. “I think he stands outside all this.” He thought of Sherlock’s reprimand-- _wrong, wrong, wrong_ \--and chose not to mention that particular conversation. “He still stalks round the flat, plays the violin, shows next to no regard for the feelings of others. He...doesn’t even look that different,” he added, after a moment’s hesitation.

Lestrade--the new Lestrade--shot him a speculative look. “Neither do you, you know. Before all this, do you know if Sherlock...if he...what his preferences were?”

The flutter in John’s gut threatened to become a thundering of wings. “What? No! No, I have no idea, I never asked--I mean, I did, but he said no. To anything.” He felt his face flush. “I mean, he has no preferences, is what I mean.”

“None?”

“No.”

Lestrade smiled then, the first smile John had seen from him since they stepped out of the cab. “I guess it must be easier when you--”

“John!” Sherlock’s voice, authoritative, expectant, shot up from the construction site below the mound of earth on which they stood. “I am in need of your assistance! What are you doing, still up there?”

“Duty calls,” John muttered, and scrambled down the embankment less than gracefully. Not at all hurrying to escape Lestrade’s line of questioning, he told himself. Not in the slightest.

Behind him, in his slender black boots and pale fluttering scarf, Lestrade continued to smile, if a touch sadly.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For science.

It was a damp day, unseasonably cool, when John thumped up the stairs and set the groceries on the counter with rather more noise than was strictly necessary.

"You could do it yourself sometimes," he growled at Sherlock's back. The silk-clad man was hunched over his laptop on the sofa, in the same bathrobe he'd been wearing when John last saw him the night before.

"Did you get milk?" Sherlock did not look up.

"Of course I did. We're out."

"Only one bottle though. Go back and get another one."

John scowled. "We're not going to go through two bottles of milk in a week; it will spoil."

Still Sherlock did not look up, or even cease typing. The frenetic tapping filled the space between them. "Did you know, John, that a woman is four times more likely to develop osteoporosis over the age of fifty than a man is? Go fetch that second bottle of milk."

John snapped his gaping jaw shut with an audible clack of tooth against tooth, and attempted to renew his scowl. "Since when do you look after yourself? Or think about your health, at all?"

"It's not for me."

"Since when do you look after my health, then?"

Tap, tappity tap. "Since it became painfully obvious that you're so uncomfortable in your own body you'd rather let it die out from under you than learn the first thing about it."

"I know lots about women, Sherlock. Probably a good deal more than you," John added, bristling.

"Yes, because women are all the same."

Had the circumstances been anything other than what they were, the dryness of the remark, given its origin, would have elicited a snort from John. As it was, he balked. 

"Are you an expert now, then? What do you know that I don't?"

Sherlock looked up, then, from his laptop, eyes piercing and very much focused on the conversation at hand, no matter that he'd seemed completely occupied not a moment prior.

"When was the last time you got off?" he asked, fixing John with a level stare. 

John's mouth opened and closed soundlessly. 

"Exactly. While what you understand about human anatomy could fill medical textbooks, John, your willingness to extend that knowledge to yourself is woefully lacking. And we're not even talking about your inability, or more correctly your refusal, to fill the holes in the knowledge--which are rather more pronounced now, by the way, given the general loop for which this whole thing has thrown the medical community--with experimentation performed upon the nearest subject to hand, namely yourself."

Sherlock's eyes blazed, even from across the room, and John resisted the urge to shift his weight, steady his ground.

Which was how he came to be standing directly before his flatmate, silhouetted in the doorway of the kitchen, when Sherlock threw open his silken dressing gown, beneath which he wore not a scrap. The robe slid to the ground with a barely audible hiss, landing in a shimmering blue pool around his ankles. 

Sherlock's ankles.

“Jesus, Sherlock!” John yelped. “The hell do you think you’re doing?” Assiduously he diverted his eyes to the wallpaper, to the chair, anywhere but at Sherlock standing there with—yes, he could see out of the corner of his eye—his hands on his hips.

“Acquainting you, John.”

“With what, for godsake?!” 

“The reality you seem so bent on ignoring.” Sherlock straightened, thrusting his chest outward as a consequence of the motion. “Were you in your former body, such a sight wouldn’t come without consequences, correct?”

“If I were in my old body you would be too!” John snapped.

“That is beside the point.” Sherlock’s voice oozed patience. Infuriatingly so. “Naked women have that effect on you, correct?”

“Yes, but—“

“But you haven’t the first idea how to proceed, with the most relevant body part _in absentia.”_

John felt his face heating. “It’s none of your business what I—“

“On the contrary.” Sherlock took a graceful step forward, exiting the heaped robe like a nymph exiting a fountain. “It is very much my business. Such a deficiency of endorphins is bound to affect your ability to serve as a competent assistant.”

“Sherlock—“

“Not to mention as a doctor. Think of the patients.”

“Sherlock!” 

The long-limbed creature that was Sherlock took another step forward, and John stepped backward into the kitchen.

“I’ve seen your internet search history, you know. You can’t deny you’re aroused by such things.”

“Yes, but—“

Pale eyes squinted slightly over a smirk. “That much hasn’t changed. I can read you like a book.”

“I’m sure you can, but this isn’t—I can’t—“

Sherlock rolled his eyes. “Of course you can’t. You can barely look at yourself in the mirror, let alone touch yourself. I, on the other hand, have researched the topic exhaustively.”

“…Exhaustively?” John’s voice echoed faintly among the pots and pans. 

“As has next to everyone else you know, I guarantee you,” Sherlock replied dryly. “Not everyone is so abjectly committed to ignoring their new body’s basic needs.” He took another step forward, and John’s attempt to retreat ran right up against the kitchen table. “How long did you intend to hold out?”

“I, ah…hadn’t thought about it…”

“Indefinitely, no doubt.” Sherlock placed his hands his hips again, deliberate in his movements. John could not help but notice that Sherlock had shaved. 

His flatmate saw him notice, and grinned viciously.

“I told you I did research.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Apparently, this is the style now.”

John licked his lips, having cemented his eyes firmly to the stainless steel of the refrigerator door. Away from all this.

“A fact which you appear to have failed to retain.”

“There wasn’t any reason to—and how was I even supposed to—without nicking—“

Sherlock barked a laugh then, and stepped closer, many more than one step’s worth. The tips of his breasts, hardened in the chill of the flat, pressed against John through the thin cotton of his shirt.

“It’s quite easy, really. Probably easier than for men, I except.” Sherlock’s voice was sinuous and low; a snake in the shadows.

John was conscious of a number of things. The uncomfortable press of the kitchen table against his spine. The whuff of Sherlock’s breath striking the pores of his face. A flushing heat, what felt like a fierce blush but deeper, down between his legs where there should have been a raging hard-on. He had no idea what to do with this feeling, and trembled, to his shame. Even setting aside the unknown territory of his body, there was the fact that this was Sherlock to consider. Sherlock. 

“I’m lost,” he whispered, barely, hating the quaver in the voice that wasn’t even his. Not even his voice was his anymore.

The face framed by tumbled curls, so close to his, shook once. Severe. “I told you I did research. Stand still.”

John felt the button atop his fly being unzipped. “But, Sherlock—“

“It’s for your own good.”

The purr of the zipper coming undone. 

“Sherlock—“

“Hush.”

John fought the rise of the flush from his legs onward, upward and down. Slammed his eyes shut against the arc of leg and curve of throat, and threw the words out into the darkness.

“But it’s _you,_ Sherlock. How am I supposed to think about you?”

A pause. The hands at his waist stopped moving. When the silence began to take on an icy tinge, John risked peeping one eye open. 

Sherlock, tall womanly Sherlock, stood frozen before him, fixing him with eyes like chips from a glacier. One beat, two, and then a flinty smile. 

“Think of me however you want.” The smile deepened. Dangerous. “Imagine I’m someone else.”  
He moved his hand then, without warning, and John’s eyes widened and then slammed shut. 

_Someone else, someone else, someone else._

The words held steady in John’s mind, one after the other, to the fluttering beat of the fingers deep inside him. Held steady, that is, until a mouth closed on his own, sending the words tumbling after each other into a meaningless abyss of lips and tongues. _Someone…someone…_ when he gasped, it was through his nose, because his mouth was blocked. He convulsed, in a way a distant part of his mind marked as familiar, and opened his eyes.

Sherlock drew his face back, blue eyes narrowing, before nodding firmly.

“You will be better now, I think,” he pronounced, withdrawing his hand from John’s slippery warmth. “Plus you can tell your colleagues that one’s former predilections, in spite of the prevailing skepticism of the medical community, remain intact.”

John’s mouth opened and closed on the words he didn’t say. 

“For science, John,” Sherlock said flatly. Flat as a board. “It was for science.” He spun around then, back toward the shimmering blue robe on the floor. His long hands grasped the silk and flung it behind him with a flourish, donning it like a cape. 

John remained pressed against the table, unmoving.

“I need to record the results.” Sherlock did not look over as he settled himself on the sofa, retrieving his laptop from where he’d left it. “You might consider going to fetch that extra bottle of milk, if you’re just going to stand there.”

John barely managed to fumble his fly closed before stalking out the door.


End file.
